Palimtextual Tracts: Susan Howe’s Rearticulation of Place

In an account of the circumstances under which she wrote the poem “Thorow” during an extended stay at Lake George in 1987, Susan Howe writes:

If there is a Spirit of Place that Spirit had me in thrall. Day after day I watched the lake and how weather and light changed it. I think I was trying to paint a landscape . . . but my vision of the lake was not so much in space as in time. I was very aware of the commercialization and near ruin at the edge of the water, in the town itself, all around—but I felt outside of time or in an earlier time and that was what I had to get on paper. For some reason this beautiful body of water has attracted violence and greed ever since the Europeans first saw it. I thought I could feel it when it was pure, enchanted, nameless. There never was such a pure place. In all nature there is violence. Still it must have been wonderful at first sight. Uninterrupted nature usually is a dream enjoyed by the spoilers and looters—my ancestors. It’s a first dream of wildness that most of us need in order to breathe; and yet to inhabit a wilderness is to destroy it. An eternal contradiction.

(“Difficulties” 20–21)

Here we see the poet positioning herself ambivalently within a powerful tradition of “the poetry of place.” From the narratives of the earliest European settlers, through the Romantic writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, to the modern poetry of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, and Gary Snyder, landscape and geography have played a central, albeit shifting, role in the American literary imagination. Howe explicitly invokes D. H. Lawrence’s notion of a “Spirit of Place,” which he understood as a “terrestrial magnetism,” an elemental “vital effluence . . . vibration . . . chemical exhalation” (6) infused, as if by osmosis, into American writing. Finding this mystical sense of connection between writing and place compelling, she articulates a yearning to transfer onto paper something of the landscape’s precolonial “wildness,” its “vital effluence” untainted by the damage of subsequent history. But her initial “if” implies skepticism toward such notions. In particular, she highlights how historical violence has shaped this place and her relation to it, and also how, as the descendent of “spoilers and looters,” she is implicated in this history. Furthermore, she recognizes that the very fantasy of “uninterrupted nature” in which she momentarily indulges is itself a construction that emerges from this history and culture of appropriation. Howe’s prose thus oscillates between a seemingly naive desire for an encounter with a primordial realm “outside of time” and a heightened awareness of the historical forces that have shaped the landscape and necessarily mediate all responses to it, including the very desire for unmediated encounter. This is indeed a poetics of place caught in “eternal contradiction.”

Such conflicting impulses are typical of Howe’s poetics more generally. As Brian Reed has so cogently observed, “[a] duck-rabbit combination of skepticism and transcendentalism is . . . a foundational part of Howe’s worldview” (par. 25). I want to suggest that this characteristic feature of her work is particularly salient for environmentally oriented debates about the poetics of place. The “eternal contradiction” performed by Howe’s place-based imagination corresponds quite strikingly with an argument in ecocritical circles between strongly constructionist perspectives and what Greg Garrard neatly characterizes as “the poetics of authenticity,” which seeks an “unmediated encounter with the real world that rescues the subject from the corrupt modern world of representation and simulation” (168).

This tension has been present within ecocriticism since its beginnings in the 1990s, when this emergent field defined itself against the poststructuralist “linguistic turn” in the humanities, seeking to reinstate nature as referent in the face of very real anthropogenic destruction. In Kate Soper’s ubiquitously cited formulation, “It is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the ‘real’ thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level...